Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Timeshot is a new tool built upon an entirely new concept of photo manipulation. Instead of using a brush to pain on photos, Timeshot uses photos to paint on photos to create stunning effects of time lapse. The software can be best understood by seeing it at work.

As you can see, the results are pretty impressive, something that would require substantial amount of work to achieve in Photoshop. Timeshot’s most practical application is on time lapse photos as shown in the demo. Other possible application of this tool are:

Using photos with different expositions so simulate a physic filter. Eg: Have both the sky and ground visible in a sunny day

Using a super slow motion video, making a photo of distorted bodies or objects moving on the scene

Taking photos with different focus and composite them so that you have several focused areas in only one photo

Composing a photo of someone jumping in snowboard and placing the person several times in the same picture.

To realize Timeshot’s true potential you will require time lapse photos. If you don’t have any, you can download the set of photos used in the demo video to try out it’s features. These are available in zipped format on the download page.

Timeshot runs on Java, tragically a poor choice of platform by the developer, particularly for such resource intensive operation like image editing. It works, but expect lots of freezing and waiting.

Update: I spoke with the developers and they said that Timeshot was initially started as a technological tester to see what framework would behave better in manipulating large amounts of photos. JavaFX came in first even against Flash (AS3) and Javascript. JavaFx also supports multithreads making executions faster in multi-core CPUs